New Years

New Year's in The Netherlands is great. I have to admit that I didn't have very good day. I was feeling pretty sick (on account of the tonsillitis) and a bit bored. My host family had a lot of relatives over for a family celebration and I felt bad that I had to keep taking breaks from the party to lie down. 

That being said, fireworks were legally allowed to begin at 9am. My host brother had been firing them all week but now we had his cousins to help him. There is a popular firework here that produces no visual effect, but sounds like a cannon when it explodes. They're perfect for the day time hours and I was hearing them constantly (not good for my headache, but I did think that they were a lot of fun). I was watching my host brother de-construct and reconstruct fireworks using a lighter as a dismantling tool. His mini-butane torch never left his side. It looked like a great time. 

I had been invited to two parties besides the family one. One of which was in a city an hour and a half a way. I decided to stay local since I was feeling so lousy. However, by the time my local party was starting I still wasn't feeling great. I took a nap. When I woke up I felt so much better. I played board games with my host family for a bit and decided just to stay put. That ended up being a really good decision for me because some serious congestion in my right ear started causing me some real pain. I laid down again. 

I got up again when I heard my host mom handing out oliebollen, a traditional New Year's treat. They're just balls of fried dough served with powdered sugar so obviously I was there for it. After that was when the real magic began: midnight. As we neared midnight the radio played the top 2000th song as annually voted on. This year (as it had been  for 15 of the past 19 years) the winner was Bohemian Rhapsody. That's what we listened to "as the ball dropped". I put it in quotations because they don't have a ball dropping ceremony in the Netherlands. I also got my family on face time for this moment, since I was a year ahead of them. It was my second New Years of the night (we had called my host sister on her exchange in Australia 9hrs prior).

My host family at this point had already started construction of a hazardously formed bonfire. The wind was howling, blowing the flames and ambers like crazy. It was also a full moon, which was beautiful, but also contributed to a slightly eerie theme.  Once midnight came it was time for fireworks. I knew that fireworks were a big deal here. I had seen lots of catalogs and lots of fireworks available in stores. Grocery stores, plant stores, hardware stores, etc. I guess I didn't realize everyone was setting off real fireworks though. I figured most people kept them close to the ground the way my host brother had been doing with his small fireworks. Obviously this was the wrong assumption. My host family began setting off real, honest to god fireworks in the street in front of our house. We were only standing like 20 ft away, maybe. But the coolest thing: our neighbors were doing it too. Both of our next-door neighbors were also doing fireworks. And people on neighboring blocks and across the water. I saw fireworks in every direction, as if I was standing in the center vertex of a 360 of fireworks. It was so cool. And even though it started at midnight plenty of people were still going an hour or hour and a half later. It definitely felt a little dangerous. A couple of fireworks went astray, but it is such a wet country that I suppose wildfires aren't much of an issue. However, yesterday I did see a news special about how firefighters and emergency rooms deal with the large increase of injuries and calls on New Years (specifically fire and firework related ones). This year (not unlike other years) there were a couple firework-related deaths. Including someone who literally blew his own head off after he looked down the barrel of his new firework (apparently confused as to why it hadn't gone off). It is now a debate in the Netherlands on whether or not fireworks should be so readily available. 

So even though I had a rough day the fireworks definitely redeemed it. You can't do anything like that in New York, I loved it. 

The videos below do not do the night justice. They also do not feature our own fireworks, but our neighbors. So we were twice as far away from those fireworks as from our own.